The History of Virtual Worlds

Terra Nova has published an article entitled “The History of Virtual Worlds”, in which they talk about the lack of archived data available for the many online games released in the last decade. It’s not exactly what I was expecting, but is worth a read nonetheless:

If a 25-year old graduate student came to me and said, “I want to write about the history of events within Meridian 59 and Ultima Online, about the narrative evolution of the games, about key episodic things that happened”, I’d pretty much say that this graduate student is in a worse situation than a historian of modern Africa. The textual sources are going to be extremely difficult to recover in a thorough way because there are both too many and too few; a lot of the rest will only be knowable through oral historical work, or through questioning people through email. I know about Dread Lord Days, and about the way Arwic was in Asheron’s Call before secure trading was introduced, and about about Sunny in LambdaMOO and so on. I know about the fetuspult in Dawn. I was there for it all. So I could write that history as an eyewitness, from the perspective of experience. Of course, I could add some sustained archival research, because I know to use keywords like “fetuspult” and “Arwic”.